Biden, Culture, Economics, Education, Elections, Governance, Politics 2022, Taxation, Transportation

CLIMATE, WHETHER OR NOT

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The Green New Deal has become a means of theft: elites taking freedom and independence, and possibly life, itself, away from the middle and lower classes.  “Oh! No!” you say, “Surely you are misinterpreting the existential threat of climate change and their intense efforts to save the planet.”  Well, no, actually I’m trying to balance reality with what we’re being told.

Many hundreds of statements and declarations are made on a weekly, monthly, annual basis – certainly on every hot day, cold day, dry day or wet day, that “climate change” is wreaking havoc on the planet and on the poor and downtrodden, minorities and LGBTQ+ “communities” worst of all.  It’s all the fault of you smug suburbanites and your SUVs spewing that awful carbon dioxide… and the cow farts you cause by eating burgers made from meat and not insects.  Don’t forget your air conditioners and outdoor grills – all hastening our extinction.

This would be such a nice planet to live on if it weren’t for all you… well… people for goodness’ sakes.  (Can’t say ‘God’s sake.’)

Actually, if it were not for the constant tilt of most media outlets, the condition of the earth and its climate could be discussed and better known by young and old, alike.  We are just coming to the end of a very hot summer.  There were drought conditions in many countries.  We will soon be inundated with claims of the planet having a “fever” and “the earth is on fire,” and similar declarations.  So far, we haven’t suffered a hurricane coming ashore to the United States; as soon as one does, we’ll be told there are more -and stronger – storms because of our driving “fossil-fueled cars” and resisting buying non-polluting “electric vehicles,” EV’s.  If we have a severely snowy winter with lots of cold, cold days, they’ll all be our fault, too.

There is some supposed perfect average global temperature… one we like.  It is impossible to define the “ideal” climate, the ideal temperature, the ideal amount of ice at the poles, the ideal amount of cloud-cover or precipitation… or the ideal anything else.  What does seem easy to idealize is the right population the earth should hold and support, and it is a Hell of a lot smaller than the population we have, today.  Various oligarchs, like Bill Gates and others, think the world is overpopulated by 5 BILLION people, or even more.  It’s going to take substantial new rates of sterility and deaths to achieve the “ideal.”  What an achievement that will be.

Around the planet ice is melting… from the poles (supposedly), Greenland, various glaciers and so forth.  This causes terrible worries.  Oddly, they’re more terrible for leftists in the West, than for conservatives.  They don’t make a damned bit of difference to leftists in Russia, China, India and elsewhere, or to Islamists, who are happy with any number of earthlings as long as they’re all Muslims – the right kind of Muslims.

It’s rather comforting that the climate is changing, whether warming or cooling at any time: the climate has been changing for hundreds of millions of years – maybe billions of years… as long as we’ve had an atmosphere.  No one would want to be here on the day the climate STOPS changing.  For most people, “climate change” translates as “global warming.”  We can see videos of running water on Greenland and shrinking glaciers in the mountains.  Definitely, it’s warming.  Then we have a summer like 2022’s and we are convinced of the imminent danger of the seas rising and a hurricane toppling our houses.  Look what happened to New Orleans, for Pete’s sake.  Maybe if they’d all had electric cars in 2005, the people who wasted the federal moneys for strengthening the dikes around the ninth ward might have gone to jail.

It’s hard to predict the future, and that’s the only kind of predicting there is.  There is a form of false, God-save-us-if-this-happens sort of prognosticating, though, that is employed stridently by “Climate Campaigners.”  It’s always negative.  People who worry about and inveigh about the climate, are certain that change means some form of doom.  They never seem to make any predictions of benefit from “climate change.”  It’s always an imminent disaster, and it’s always our fault, meaning that we have to make drastic changes to avert certain death in as few as 10 or 12 years.

The premise of prediction is history.  Recorded history of what people have done, or which volcanoes blew up or geologic evidence of mile-thick ice sheets that created the Great Lakes and the like, as well as records of various past weather trends and climatological periods, provide a basis from which inferences are drawn and, in very grave tones, predictions are made about the future of climate and weather over the next hundred years or so.  It’s all very scientific, except it’s impossible to replicate the conditions to see if the same effects take place, so climatologists are unable, actually, to apply the scientific method to historic evidence and add to the evidence of the first “experiment,” seeking correlation.

Atmospheric scientists have gained great knowledge and reasonable predictive power of weather deriving from worldwide patterns like El NiĂąo, although little has been said about movements of the magnetic poles, for example, and the focus of charged particles changing cloud formation patterns.  The availability of satellite data, global photography and thousands of measurements daily and hourly, have given meteorologists perhaps too much confidence in prediction, and this has seeped in to the self-esteem of climatologists, too.

Whether from ice cores or dendrochronology (tree rings), climatologists can paint what they feel is an accurate picture of what the climate has been for hundreds, if not thousands of years.  Things become more sketchy when they try to make inferences as to WHY they were the way they were.  Bias, or belief, can sway even the best scientists’ theories of cause and effect.  It’s something “science” ostensibly guards against and works against no matter the line or field of inquiry.  Replicating experiments and finding the same or similar results – and publishing those results for other scientists to review and try to replicate or prove wrong, is how science makes real progress towards understanding.

It is not possible to replicate the past; it’s not possible to mimic all the conditions, both on the earth and impacting the earth hundreds or thousands of years ago.  But there is great pressure, whether personal or from the all-important funding sources (grants) for a direct correlation to be discerned… cause and effect.  Why?  Because the reason the study of the past is being funded is often because of beliefs about today’s climate and weather, and that there is a way that humans and their bold politicians can avoid the conditions of the past.  A little humidity – if not humility – is called for.

Politicians and the scientists they fund, have an overriding belief that we humans can modify the climate to keep weather as pleasant as we like, the oceans at the depths they currently are, the glaciers as big as they are if not bigger, and polar bears in their favorite conditions, too.  Underlying this presumption is a belief that we humans have caused changes in the climate to begin with.  Otherwise, we are powerless to undo the damage it is believed we have done!  So, to start with, let’s agree that humans HAVE altered the climate somewhat, and not just around cities.

Cities form “heat islands” with huge blocks of real and manufactured stone, steel and asphalt absorbing more sunlight than the natural environment they replaced.  But huge, multi-square-mile farms also modify natural environments, also changing sunlight absorption, requiring and transpiring huge volumes of water – water that is artificially moved away from its natural location(s).  Are either of these commonplace alterations of the natural environment changing climate?  Somewhat, but how much?  It is very hard to quantify or even describe.  That is, we know the CAUSES we’re concerned about, but we cannot, despite many claims, actually pin down the EFFECTS of these two causes.  Certainly there are some, but what should people be forced to stop doing in order to offset those effects?  We don’t really know, but there is a strong political pressure to force people to stop doing something because of some politicians’ FEARS.  Indeed, one of their biggest fears is of doing nothing or, worse, of failing to force other people to stop doing something.

The urge to do something and to force others to do something comes, deep down, from a belief that a wise-enough human, especially from the leftist persuasion, can control almost anything, including populations, countries and planets.  To a great degree, these same authoritarians will automatically adopt any tool or method to control those who aren’t in agreement with them, especially people whose faith tends toward religious origins rather than government ones.  Soon, the authoritarians commence to blaming those who don’t agree with their beliefs, for the problems they believe they, the ‘wise,’ are destined to solve.  Any contrary data, facts or “science” non-leftists discover, are automatically denigrated and their proponents are labeled “deniers,” as an attempt to more firmly cement the immutable truth of what leftists believe.  It becomes difficult to discuss or debate ideas in that environment.

Because CO2 is generated by so many human activities and machines, not least of which is electricity generation, and because climatologists have observed wide fluctuations in the apparent concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere over millennia from all those ice cores and tree rings, there has grown up a set of beliefs about the correlation of temperatures at different points in time and CO2.  We can summarize this fear quite easily: More CO2 than the magical percentage is BAD; less CO2 than the magical percentage is GOOD.  Sometimes the rise in CO2 concentration precedes a warming period, sometimes it follows, but there is definitely, we’re almost certain… in fact, we’re so close to certain that it’s time to pass laws that we think will reduce the amount of CO2 that enters the atmosphere so that the average temperature of the entire planet’s biosphere can be controlled.

Whether these temperature fluctuations are caused by carbon-dioxide or not is unproven and unprovable.  But, it is definitely believed by many.  Of course, CO2 is essential for life and good for vegetation in particular, from which our food derives: farms and crops and things.  So we wouldn’t want to interfere too much, would we?  How much is too much?  It’s impossible to say, but less than we’re making now, we’re quite certain.

CO2, methane, nitrous oxide and water vapor are the primary “greenhouse gases.”  They’re all natural.  Many chlorinated and fluorinated gases that we manufacture also have the effect of “trapping” solar energy.  Fortunately, they are much smaller fractions of the atmosphere, although not as small a fraction as the dreaded CO2.  [See http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2017/07/20/a-home-on-the-beach/ ]

It’s common to see descriptions of human contributions to total greenhouse gases based on what percent of our (American) contribution is CO2.  This makes it look like CO2 is a gigantic problem and the U. S. contributes over 70% of it!  Ye Gods!  Stop breathing!  On the other hand, it is very reassuring that over 70% of what we contribute is CO2 and not methane or manufactured gases.  Methane is natural gas, basically, and the product of bacterial action on organic materials, like food we eat or grasses and grains that cattle, deer, antelope, bears and squirrels eat, among other living things.  Those gases escape, both intentionally and accidentally.  As far as we know, animal escapes are all accidental.  Still, methane is a greenhouse gas, the concentration of which also should be reduced, according to the magical percentage theory of global management.  This has led to calls to reduce cattle herds and, less publicized, to reduce human herds, too.  Ye Gods, again!

Those who are deeply committed to the magical percentages of greenhouse gases theory, are equally committed to blaming their fellow humans for every weather event that is less than perfectly comfortable for everyone from the Amazon watershed to the arctic tundra.  Everything is now our fault.  It has become a great tool for forcing people to accept authoritarian government as it lovingly struggles to avert the imminent climate catastrophe.  A “climate crisis” is declared repeatedly.  Taxpayers and anyone who wants the United States to survive and prosper, should have justifiable concern about any use of “crisis” in relation to items of government interest.  The designation is uniformly employed to justify borrowing from future generations to create politically advantageous spending, now.  There’s a $31 TRILLION liability on our balance sheet that demonstrates the effectiveness of this spending strategy.  Thus it is that “climate change” has become “climate crisis,” a political tool, and not just for the U. S.  Climate is global, and through the World Economic Forum [See http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2022/04/16/where-the-globalists-struck-first/ ] it is politically valuable to globalists and other socialists.  There is no reason to trust them.

The W.E.F. has determined that nitrogen-based chemicals, like most fertilizers, must be curtailed in order to save the planet.  You can see the conflict: humans eat the products of fertilized crops.  We like to eat meat, too, often simultaneously, and the animals that provide it also contribute to nitrogen chemicals resulting from bodily functions.  It is what it is.  The globalist solution?  Less eating!  Unfortunately, many governments pay attention to the blatherous emanations of the W.E.F., and adjust policies to fit.  You can read of the effects of this nonsense in the Netherlands, where farmers are in serious protest, or in Sri Lanka where people are starving.  Oddly, the same people who want to mandate the mRNA “vaccines” are they who want to limit food supplies to avoid climate change.  Are the two efforts connected in purpose?  Population reduction?  Certainly, in terms of the net effects of the Covid-19 “vaccines,” population reduction appears to be the biggest net effect.  The spike in non-Covid deaths among the healthiest demographic (ages 25 to 64) in the U. S., Canada and the U. K., is continuing.  The victims are vaccinated against Covid.

It seems intensely Prudent to be intensely skeptical of the unsubstantiated claims of Climate believers. 

We should consider the benefits of warming and the ancillary costs of attempting “carbon neutral” or, worse, “zero carbon” by any date-certain.  All the public statements about “climate change” fit under one heading: “The sky is falling!!” Note the dual exclamation points!  Once the rabid claims are sorted out – and the overblown statistics corrected-for – the best projection for the extent of warming is 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by year 2100.  What are the upsides?

One is longer growing seasons for the crops that sustain the world’s population.  This can also translate to requiring less fertilization and more fallow periods for fields, enabling natural processes to enrich the soil between crops.  There will be more arable land, now covered by ice.  Some may think this is a tragedy, but those who live near the ice are glad to see it go.  Earth’s current weather patterns will change.  This may mean more rain in lots of areas.  Deserts that have evidence of past wet periods might return to that condition, improving opportunities for many peoples to feed themselves and spend less time on subsistence, leaving more time to develop their societies and, perhaps, correct their crappy politics and improve millions of people’s lives and futures.

Less energy will be expended heating homes and other buildings; less fuel expended clearing snow.  Meanwhile, should we manage to avoid or stifle the warlike designs of globalists and Communists, the invention and innovation of free, well-nourished people will be making at least as much progress in engineering and science as we’ve made in the past 80 years.  Our economies will cost less in energy density, transportation will be logarithmically more efficient.  People who are bound by ideologies that condemn half the population, and who are willing to twist “science” for political advantage, cannot conceive of humans creating solutions to the problems that serve one political ideology today: leftist authoritarianism.

In short, there are more reasons to hope for the future than to fear it.  If we have the wisdom to restore freedom as our flame of purpose, there is nothing to fear.  Biden and his ilk will be gone.  Education will be dramatically decentralized and made honest and non-ideological.  Freedom, Hope and Genuine Progress: bring it on!

Crime, Culture, Education, Elections, Race, Religion, Responsibility

Heil Soros!

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It is certainly obscure, even mysterious, why a wealthy oligarch like George Soros would expend his fortune on the election of socialist, soft-on-crime District and States’ Attorneys.  He has had an outsized impact on not only crime rates and, automatically, the victims of criminal acts, but also on the reduction in trust of government, police and justice, itself.  Still, there must be a plan.

It doesn’t seem that Soros’ purpose stems from a love of crime or even any particular sympathy for the weak-minded dopes who commit crimes.  He doesn’t appear to be an advocate for all things anti-White or pro-Black.  But, there must be a plan and, considering his actions Prudently, the shape of the plan can be discerned.  It is quite simple.

Soros is a socialist – a virulent one.  He doesn’t seem to trust Communists, which is a mark of intelligence, but, like most political socialists, believes that socialism can be controlled and manipulated to fit the goals of oligarchs and one-worlders.  By employing a process that breaks down civil order and public safety, Soros makes clear his contempt for the “proletariat,” which is most of us.  He has always seemed offended, as it were, by the Constitutional limits that underpin the United States, the belief in “unalienable rights” that they guarantee, and, even more, the basically Christian love of freedom and personal sovereignty.  Soros hates the power and influence of the United States of America, and of Americans.

So, it seems clear that the purpose of destroying cities through increasing crime and lack of trust in authority, is designed to force Americans to accept authoritarian forms of government… so as to “clean up” the crime, drug, homelessness and other problems that make normal citizens unsafe.  It’s simple, really, and it won’t take long.  There is already a significant political party/movement that is pushing for exactly the solutions Soros wants: Democrats.  Their experience in promoting and excusing multi-city rioting and destruction, weakening of police departments and removal of the only populist president in our lifetimes, in 2020, and the ability to control almost everyone, including stripping many of their “unalienable rights” by building up the Covid-19 scare of 2020 – 2021 and beyond, encourages Democrats to attack the Constitution directly.  They, and Soros, have won some victories.

Are any students, anywhere in America, learning why what Soros has been doing with his money is evil and anti-American?  By the same token, are any learning about the Constitution, itself?

Biden, Economics, Elections, Family, Foreign Policy, Health Care, Politics 2022, Representation, Taxation

THE INFLATION CHRONICLES

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The Biden “administration” has done everything it could in 19 months to destroy the trajectory of the U. S. economy, and, possibly, U. S. permanence.  Above all, everyone is either helped or hurt by the big “bugaboo,” inflation.  Economists, pundits, commenters and news-readers galore, all have wise-sounding opinions, yet no one seems to know what inflation IS!

It seems Prudent to assume that some of them do, but the average person listening to any such is not going to find it out.  To a mouth, all say in so many, many words, that “inflation” is prices increasing.  Well, no it isn’t.  Inflation is inflation of the money “supply.”  And that isn’t even accurate; it’s inflation of available cash OR CAPITAL that is “liquid,” or lendable.  Capitalism and “inflation” go hand-in-hand to create prosperity for most people.

“Wait just a minute,” you’re thinking, “Inflation makes prices go up, and that’s bad, so it’s not helping MY prosperity.”  Actually, it has helped it – look at the riches and bounty we enjoy.  It’s a two-edged sword… like fire.  It can cook our food, keep us warm, run our engines or… burn the house down.  The key is keeping inflation where it runs the engine without burning down the house.  So, where does this wonderful inflation come from?

The simple answer is debt.  Our economy – even your personal economy – operates on a “futures” basis.  If you own your home you probably have a mortgage on it, which is a long-term debt, well into the future.  One of the quirks in our economy is that banks can legally loan out more “money” than they actually have on deposit.  It’s called “fractional reserve,” and it is about 14%.  In other words, among all the stored “savings” deposits and “performing loans” and temporary deposits, the “Bank” has an average number of dollars “in reserve,” at any given time.  If it amounts to a million dollars, our laws allow the bank to lend out up to $7 Million, round numbers, of which 6/7ths is, fundamentally, air.  So long as the honesty and ability to repay of most borrowers are intact, this is a safe system and the recipient of the check for the house you bought, accepts the dollars that were created to write it, as well as if he saw them peeled from a big fat roll of $100-dollar bills.

If the seller of the house also dealt with the same bank, his or her new deposit of, say, $400 thousand will, for a while, increase the average “reserve” the bank can lend seven times as much of.

Anyway, you commit to paying your mortgage for 20 or 30 years because the pain of losing your home is worse than the pain of making the payments.  Besides, you have a job, you’re productive, you’re helping to create profits somewhere – productive surplus, if you will.  It is reasonable that you will keep your promise to pay.  You have made your work valuable enough to produce some “productive surplus” for your own family.

Try to imagine where the construction industry and millions of jobs would be if there were no such thing as mortgages or construction loans.  But, if you’re worried about inflation, look at what you just did: you caused the inflation of the money supply by about $340,000!  Depending on the “velocity” of that money (through the economy), possibly even more than that.  But!  It’s OK.  You’re going to pay it down – or “back” – to the bank.  Owning that house will cause you to buy a bunch of other stuff that increases production (let’s hope, inside the U. S.), as well as future repairs and upgrades, and it will enable you to raise your children to become productive, too.

Transactions like these happen thousands of times a day, whether for homes, or cars, or work vehicles, trailer trucks and on and on.  Every loan creates some inflation, but not more than the “economy” will absorb, or, we might say, not more than the economy needs.

In the process of economic activity, wages, sales and so forth, governments collect taxes.  That is, BECAUSE THERE IS PRODUCTIVE SURPLUS in our economic activity, “we” can afford to pay taxes for those services and public works that individuals cannot provide for themselves.  Among these are public school facilities, police departments, fire departments, all the bureaucrats who are there to help US, the military, highway and roadway constructions, sewage treatment, water works and sewers, themselves.  All that stuff is paid for from productive surplus.  If kept in a rough balance, it all works together amazingly well as more people become productive and relatively financially independent, and benefiting in safety and economy from our shared public works.

How does it get out of balance?  Put most simply, if the money supply grows with no commensurate increase in production or productivity.  Take the example we’ve experienced recently where governments, based on perceived, raw, political advantage, decree that the “minimum wage” shall be $15.00 per hour.  A kid stuck at the fry station in a McDonald’s, making French fries for as many customers as desire some, gets a sudden, say, 20% pay increase.  He or she cannot fry more potatoes than before the raise, there are only so many orders for fries in a given day.  The added pay does not enable the fry-kid to encourage more people to buy fries than they used to buy before the change in pay.  Do you think the individual cost of an order of fries is going up?  Of course.  Or, is it possible that customers might wait a little longer to get their fries – and their whole orders, when it’s busier?  Perhaps the restaurant owner can’t afford to put two kids at the fry station in busy periods, now that the pay has increased arbitrarily.  The customer pays – or suffers – for this arbitrary work rule.

So, French fries go up in price, but is that “inflation?”  Well, no, obviously.  It’s an imposed change to the “CGS,” or Cost of Goods Sold.  How would inflation cause the price of French fries to go up?

Suppose that in a certain marketplace: your town, for example, there are both a lot of disposable income – free cash, as it were – and a limited supply of frozen French fries.  Potatoes are neither grown nor processed locally; they are transported some distance to the restaurants that want them in your town.  People in your town are in the habit of ordering fries with their burgers and sub sandwiches and business in fries is brisk.

Because the supply of spendable cash has been inflated (increased), people who might have held off adding fries to their sandwich orders, have started to order them more frequently, yet the total volume of fries coming from the processors can’t increase for quite a while, as the extra cash in everyone’s pocket makes it possible to afford the fries in other towns, as well, and the price of fries appears to be a bargain where they used to be a bit of a luxury.

Restaurants are finding that they’re “selling out” of fries and seeing customers go to another restaurant that still has some.  The owners get on the phone to order more fries but there aren’t any extra to be had.  Very quickly busier restaurants will offer a premium price to the distributor to get an extra case of frozen fries every day.  Realizing the nature of the increased demand, the distributor makes a deal with a potato processor who guarantees additional frozen fries, but at a higher wholesale price, too.

Pretty soon, the French fry supply problem is solved and people in your town can obtain all the fries they want, although each order costs a little more.  Lo, and Behold!  Inflation of the money supply changed demand patterns in the French fry marketplace.  This example is too simple, but also real.  During the engineered Covid crisis, the federal government wrote checks to millions of people that it/they, the federal, state and municipal governments had thrown out of work… billions and billions of dollars’ worth, but they were from accounts that had no actual – although highly hoped-for-future – money in them!  The checks were written from AIR.  Worse, they were doled out without regard to increasing productivity or other economic growth.  No new crops were planted, tended or harvested; no new mines were opened and their valuable minerals retrieved; no new inventions were spurred causing new manufacturing to commence.  But people accepted the ‘air-checks’ and spent them like money.  The money supply increased by over a Trillion Dollars while the supply of goods to be purchased actually went DOWN!

Prices started to go up until states started to re-open their businesses and let people go back to work.  The economy was roaring back when Biden was shoveled into office.  He promptly signed another Trillion-dollar “Covid Relief” bill that was no longer needed, indeed it extended payments to not work, and inflation really started shooting up.  The money supply – more air, but who’s counting – was now completely untethered from productivity, production or quantities of goods for sale.  In addition, there was an even larger incentive to not work.  The Consumer Price Index (CPI) started to take off in a serious way.

Because of “petro-dollars,” a sweetheart deal we made with Saudi Arabia (and, therefore, OPEC) when Nixon closed the gold window in the early ‘70’s, our federal spenders have developed a habit of calling everything a “crisis.”  It doesn’t have to be a war, a disaster, a plague… just a problem – like getting re-elected.  And, since there is (almost always) a terrible crisis, they can justify borrowing to resolve it.  So, they spend about one-third or more, MORE than the real money tax receipts that the federal government collects each year.  That missing third or 40% or so must be borrowed, largely adding to the “national debt.”

Now, if the extra federal spending were creating real wealth, which is what real investment does, the loans would steadily be repaid by the productive surplus the investments made possible.  Another way of saying it is that the DEBT would be DESTROYED.  That’s a good cycle: ideas vetted, loans obtained, practices, processes or new resources are implemented or obtained,* and the new productive surplus can be applied, in part, to “retire” the loan while net societal – or National – wealth increases.  Living standards improve and the repaid capital (the loan) becomes available for other real investments.

This neat system collapses when non-productive or ANTI-productive effects of the loan (deficit spending, it’s called) are mandated by law.  Most commonly, it collapses because the government borrows money to PAY FOR CURRENT EXPENSES, like welfare, interest on older loans, increasing the numbers of people employed in non-productive pursuits, and so forth.  A good example of hiring more people to be non-productive is part of the recently passed “Prosperity Reduction Act,” or, as it is officially mis-labeled, “The Inflation Reduction Act.”  Inside of this dishonest legislation is a provision to hire 87,000 more IRS agents, who will harass and impoverish productive people (tax-payers they are called) with absolutely no increase in productive surplus for anyone.  Oh, there’ll be some fat paychecks, but the net wealth of our economy will decline. 

The extra payroll dollars (among others in the bill) will inflate the money supply, however, and prices will move upward again as more cash chases fewer goods.

There are $600+Billion other dollars in the “bill” that also don’t represent any new production, productivity or wealth… they just lower the value of all the dollars floating around or in your wallet and retirement accounts.  Thanks, Brandon.

*Where are new resources “obtained?”  Well, there are only so many sources of new wealth that can add to an economy and total wealth of a nation.  The first is agriculture.  The elements of a crop of wheat or corn or soybeans or potatoes, are relatively inexpensive.  We count on God to provide the soil, the rain and sunlight… even the seeds, although humans have figured out how to augment everything but sunlight, and how to till the soil and harvest the crops with automated machinery, which has reduced the cost of labor in food production, as well.  Barring weather disasters and political interference, agriculture creates new wealth with every crop-cycle.  Many inventions and new mechanizations have been developed in response to the need for better food production as population has grown.

Coincident with expanding agriculture are various forms of mining, whether for coal, metals, oil, gypsum, quartz and dozens of other riches the earth provides.  From them have come thousands… no, Millions of products and inventions and improvements to standards of living, not least of which are pharmaceuticals and computer chips.  Virtually every one of these bits of progress and improvement has required some “financing,” or, as better known, debt.  Little by little every step has also “inflated” the money supply, but in rough equivalence to the new economic activity each has spurred.  A lot of that activity has been in the form of “fixed” assets, like buildings, roads, bridges and so forth.  At their creation, “fixed” expenditures DEFLATE the money supply, while enabling long-term economic benefit for lots of other activities, comforts or safety.

Somebody is going to paint those buildings.  We’re still driving across bridges that were built by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930’s.

Some companies, banks, agencies, treasuries and individuals are benefitted very nicely by inflation, primarily the federal government.  They get to spend the money first.  Debts and other invoices the federal government owes are paid off with “cheaper” dollars.  Increased payrolls result in increased tax receipts.  Favored industries obtain contracts and payments to carry out policies incorporated in the inflationary legislation.  Millions of votes are purchased as loans are forgiven and exorbitant expenses incurred and paid off.  So, some benefit immediately and don’t begrudge deficit spending.  Others, tax-payers, not so much.

The actual net result is a reduction in both national and individual wealth for MOST people.  The few favored in the legislation get an artificial boost of income.  It’s all very unfair and sold to the American people as a universal “good.”  But, what does it have to do with “petro-dollars?”

Petro-dollars refers to our agreement with OPEC that oil would be traded only for dollars.  Every nation, basically, would need to always have some dollars on deposit – some even made the U. S. dollar a “reserve” currency – so that when they needed to buy oil they could.  If they sold oil, they accepted having billions of U. S. dollars on deposit.  Dollars could be exchanged for any other currency an “oil” nation needed to buy products from anyone.  Still, a global acceptance of dollars gave a golden “carte blanche” to ignorant congresspeople to borrow without any practical limit.  All they need is a “crisis.”

At the same time that President Biden has ruined relations with Saudi Arabia and the rest of OPEC, and attacked fossil-fuels in the United States, multiple countries like Russia, China, Brazil and Iran, are making moves to eliminate the dollar as the currency of trade in oil.  When they succeed – WHEN they succeed – countries will start dumping dollars.  They won’t have the impetus to buy stuff from the U. S. in order to use up the dollars they have had to hold.  Currency markets will turn upside down.

We will experience price increases that are unimaginable.  All the goods and goodies that we import now, will have to be paid for with more valuable currencies than U. S. dollars.  Exchange rates are going to punish the dollar when that day comes.  All the dollars that have been created in other countries and banks have been inflating the same “money supply” we talked about earlier.  Every dollar BILL is, in fact, a bill that must be paid with something valuable, not merely with more “Federal Reserve Notes.”  The mendacious debt that Congresses and administrations have racked up to the tune of almost $31 TRILLION, will complete its cycle of inflation, as well, while much of the trading world rejects payments in dollars, preferring gold, rubles, rials, or, most likely, yuan.  We have no concept of and no political ability to balance our books and bring the number of dollars floating around into alignment with some form of productive output from our economy.  Prices, for everything, will shoot up.

We can see the World Economic Forum, a group of self-selected control freaks by which real governments – including our own – are being influenced, is spreading the organic fertilizer of “nitrogen pollution,” since carbon-dioxide hasn’t scared enough people.  To limit “nitrogen” requires, in their view, reducing crop yields (by refraining from using chemical fertilizers) and going “organic.”  There is an agenda that is far removed from “climate” at work here.  What will we do when hyper-inflation is chasing reduced supplies of food around the world?  Or, when Chinese- and Bill Gates-owned land is held out from cultivation in our own country?  We need miss only ONE growing season to be faced with famine, which is very unpleasant, even here.

Looking at the effects of the “green” movement and the recent pandemic-inspired tyranny, and the so-called vaccines that resulted, the main effects, cumulatively, have been death and sterilization.  Sounds like population reduction, if one were being Prudent.  Lo, and behold!  Bill Gates and the people he hob-nobs with agree that there are too many people on Earth, by a factor of two-thirds or more!  Let’s “vaccinate” every person on the planet.  Inflation won’t be a problem, then.

Culture, Education, Family, Politics 2022, Religion, Responsibility, Sex

SEX SELLS

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It is becoming ever more clear that there are good, solid, society-strengthening, family-strengthening and tribe- or nation-strengthening reasons to NOT sink into hyper-sexuality and debauchery.

“Oh, come on, you damned Republican prude, sex is fun and ‘empowering’ for individuals that didn’t like themselves before learning to translate everything about life and economics into sexuality.  Don’t be such a Donnie Downer.”  And, if one steps back from identity politics far enough to see the forest AND the trees, that one can see the point being made in that reactive statement.

Now, now, now… calm down, there.  America and the West have tried a 60-year experiment in immorality and sexual depravity, all couched in terms of “love,” “freedom,” “rights,” and “health care.”  It has proven extremely confusing, mainly because all the things the experiment was supposed to make better, have proven to become worse.

Of course, the prime target of the acids produced (and “dropped”) by the experiment has been morality, primarily Christianity.  REGARDLESS of your opinion of “the Church” or any reformation thereof, or of “the Bible,” the rules for living contained in both Testaments, are far, far better than the pack of “rights” and re-defined words we attempt to operate society with, today.  There is plenty of evidence of the breakdown of “Western” civilization, here in 2022, not least of which is the installation of an American administration controlled by mostly traitors and liars, and the “root cause” of this breakdown is mirrored by, or caused by, the spread of hyper-sexuality, mainly, but not exclusively, in forms of “non-binary” expressions.

“Oh, you hateful homophobic trans-phobe!  You can’t say that, you hater.  Next you’ll say you’re opposed to gay marriage.  Hummphh!”

It is not Prudence’ intent to use broad-brush half, or even smaller fractional truths to express feelings about others’ partial truths.  She intends to make very pointed statements about them.  Some examples might help.

Let’s consider pornography.  No one talks about it anymore.  In the 1950’s and 60’s pornographic photography came of age, or so people thought, in part thanks to Polaroid technology whereby film negatives didn’t have to be shared with any third parties in order to be shareable.  Of course there were always hidden, secretive “foreign” magazines from “Sweden” or some other exotic place, but, for the most part, “porn” was under-the-counter or back-room stuff in sleazy joints that most honorable, upright citizens would never frequent.  And then came “Playboy.” 

With Playboy numerous barriers were breeched: a new envelope was created, as it were, and ever more prurient publications pushed to stretch it.  Our own Constitution was unprepared for it.  The First Amendment had to be applied in some way to keep porn under wraps… and it couldn’t.  Judges, themselves, couldn’t agree on what constituted pornography or obscenity.  Pictures, and full-color, high-definition videos, of course, of naked bodies in the midst of various activities, are “protected speech” according to clever attorneys and agreed-to by judges, including supreme court justices.  Somewhere along the line, unlike the strict definitions of words usually applied to the Constitution, “speech” has been stretched to include “expression” which is automatically stretched to include bodily movement and exposure, all sorts of cursing and verbal attack.  One can almost hear the arguments.

“Freedom of Speech” now means any form of observable or audible activity detectable by another.  So, what, you ask?  Well, how about skewing life and sexuality toward unreality?  Do you not see the damage to marriage, families and morality?  And, now that what used to be hidden in various ways is quite public (any “Gay Pride parade), in movies and on television and a raft of advertising campaigns, can we even define morality?

“Morality?” you scream… “You mean that Christianity stuff?  Separation of church and state, pal!”  Hyper-sexuality has become the most effective weapon against true religion, most particularly, Christianity.  Just count the rainbow flags and laws that are closing in on what pastors and priest can even SAY within the liturgy.  What good has over-sexualizing everything from elementary school to church services actually done for America?

“Well, we can have more and innovative forms of sexual pleasure, so there… besides, it’s a free country and she can always have an abortion if something happens.”  Something.  And, it makes health care busier.

Let’s consider another example: the “trans-gender explosion.”

Hyper-sex has become a tool of the left – perhaps it always was.  We can define the left as always attempting to erode freedom and responsibility, turning both over to some form of tyranny, camouflaged or not.  Federalizing every personal unhappiness is a clear marker, making tyranny stronger and individuals weaker.  Ultimately, spirituality and religion are weakened or lost altogether, as we are experiencing, now.  Back to “trans.”

Public schools, so-called, are increasingly federal, government schools, with “the public,” whose offspring are the reasons for their and their teaching staffs’ existence, increasingly excluded from participation or influence.   Children, from the age of 5, and even earlier in “pre-schools,” are carefully prepared to distrust their parents, prepared to ignore their own realities, like physical features and even names, IN SCHOOL!  Teachers, to whom the kiddos are entrusted for 3, 4, 5, 6 hours a day and more, and who are clear authority figures and sources of wisdom – which every child is attempting to gain – are spending less time educating the kids in preparation for adulthood, and more time guiding, or grooming them, for early-onset sexual experimentation and experience.  “Do you feel like a boy or a girl, today?”

“You can feel like both, if you want.  We’ll call you by a name you like better and we’ll use the pronouns that fit how you feel.”

“Don’t tell your parents about your new name; they’ll be mad at you.  You can change into different clothes when you get to school – to match your new name.  It will be our secret.”

Can you imagine such conversations? … from TEACHERS?  These are your tax dollars at work.  When the kids are older, the boys are taught how to tuck their penises into certain underwear so that they’ll look like girls in their underpants rather than boys.  What the Hell do “underpants appearances” have to do with school?

Girls are taught to bind their breasts so they’ll look more like boys.  Both are offered drugs to prevent development in puberty, risking permanent physical damage and developmental retardation and likely sterility.  Is that the point?  To prevent more children?  Or is it simply, and cruelly, designed to dissolve tradition and normalcy and family bonds?

Who, or what “institution” benefits from the breakdown of chastity?  Casting about in all directions reveals only a single beneficiary: government… and Satan, one might say, often indistinguishable.  And as it expands, it is not a government of benign partnership in the success of its citizens; it is a government that almost automatically divides its population against one another, increasing dependence upon… you guessed it, not freedom, but increasingly tyrannical government.

Government of, by and for the government.  87,000 new, armed, IRS agents will do that.  None of their purpose is to enhance freedom – it’s to vacuum money from we the serfs.

Interestingly, the strongest political force against this foul creep of foul creeps, is parents, fighting to keep their families intact and their children as pure as possible. 

Why the hyper-sexualization of kids, though?  There is an overarching control-meme pushing otherwise professional and ostensibly educated people to adopt Critical Gender and Race theories.  We can encapsulate it with the term, “ideology,” but that’s the same charge these groomers use against religion: ideology, a belief system without empirical proof.  And, they are the first to shout the loudest about “impose your religious mumbo-jumbo on my body…”  Yet, the only “proof” that has emitted from Critical Gender Theory is the destruction of lives, families, suicides and lifelong regrets in all but the rarest of cases.  And WE’RE the haters?

Dear friends, we are fighting the Anti-Christ, pure Marxism.  Marx, who believed in God, believed also that he would go to Hell for his philosophies.  He knew what he was doing and advocating.  We need to know, also, and reverse the tide on Marxist hatred that seems to have infected much of our American governance.  Those who are its advocates have adopted the anti-life, anti-freedom philosophies for the crassest, crappiest political advantage and wealth.  For shame.

Biden, Crime, Economics, Governance, Immigration, Obama, Politics 2022

WELCOME MAT, DOORMAT

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AP

WELCOME MAT, DOORMAT

Following the assassination of John Kennedy, numerous bad, poorly thought-out ideas became legislation and law, not least of which was “The Great Society.”  Among them was the Immigration and Nationality Act.  Promoted by avowed socialist, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the “Hart-Celler” act opened immigration to all nations somewhat equally, no longer favoring European nations, and gave preference to those who claimed relatives already resident in the U. S.  The wording of the bill included preference for skilled persons, but the new relative-based “Chain” migration superseded that.

Immigration increased and shifted dramatically in nationalities represented, but it took a while for Democrats, fairly solidly in power in the congress for 40 years, to grasp the possibility of using immigration to increase the population of Democrat voters.  In 1986, during the Reagan administration, the first codification of a premise called “amnesty,” the Simpson-Mazzoli Act, was sold to the President as a means to control illegals’ taking of jobs in the private economy, while strengthening the Border Patrol.  Rather than a “solution” it created a platform for increasing problems, the worst of which, in a legal sense, is the concept of “amnesty,” which is a pleasant-sounding term for “helping” the downtrodden.  Amnesty does, in fact, help the poor unfortunates who “risk everything” to escape less-pleasant circumstances to sneak into the U. S., which is not to say that such “helping” is the business of the U. S. or of those American citizens elected to administer the government of the United States.

That is, “our” representatives, the crux of our democratic Republic, have NO BUSINESS giving away the birthright or adopted, legal citizen-rights of U. S. citizens.  Prudence hopes that statement is not confusing to her readers.

Between these two nation-weakening steps the political left in the U. S. learned the power of guilt as a means of twisting national direction.  Hillary Clinton and many others thought her husband’s presidency was finally the time to take over health care, a cornerstone of the Communist Manifesto.  While the timing was off, and Bill Clinton’s mendacity led to his moving rightward to win re-election, the pattern was set.  Along with “de-education” by their friends in the education unions, left-facing Democrats could shift America to a one-party state with sufficient guilt (over racism), the unseating of Christianity, and control of the Supreme Court – courts, generally, being merely another political tool to use when Americans proved too dense to agree with global socialism.  Hatred became the political engine to keep the shift moving.

Hatred was firmly applied in the George W. Bush administration.  Hardly a day passed that he wasn’t vilified, yet he still managed to defeat Kerry to earn a second term.  The election of Barack Obama established non-compromise as a policy.  Not only with “Obamacare,” but with numerous issues, compromise with Republicans became the very last, possible resort to get things done.  No longer were Republicans brought in to help shape solutions; Obama’s goals were all transformative, anti-Constitutional, and, largely, party-line.  “Elections have consequences.”

A fairly porous southern border became, under Obama, fairly open.  For the first time “caravans” of illegal immigrants formed up at the southern Mexico border, or in Guatemala, and moved north with substantial help from human traffickers – cartels that found they could charge many thousands of dollars for individuals and whole families to get to the U. S. border.  They even taught the interlopers what to say to guarantee a hearing on refugee or asylee status.  Illegal entrants, always a problem, nearly untouched by “amnesty,” became a flood.  Obama and his corrupt AG, Eric Holder, had no interest in stemming the flow.  Despite higher “deportation” numbers than previous administrations, Obama changed the immigration landscape with selective enforcements and easier entry for children.  Cartels took advantage of changes and began teaching people to say the right things to create potential asylum, and to have children with them at the border, even if only “rented” for the purpose.  â€œImmigration” became one of the potent issues that propelled Donald Trump into the White House.

Obama, extra-legally, also invented “DACA,” Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals.  By executive order the President changed the status of those who were brought into the U. S. illegally before they turned 18, making them magically less illegal than their parents.  It covered some 750,000 child arrivals.  That group also were given renewable work permits.  Since they had “grown up” in the U. S., everyone felt sorry for them and that it would be cruel to force them back to their own countries.  More magic.

At the time of the 1986 Amnesty bill / farce, illegals were estimated to number about 7 million.  As the next few years passed under Clinton, that estimate slid up to “12 million,” and no matter how illegal they might be, surely it was not possible to “arrest 12 million people” and deport them!  The groundwork for lawlessness being rewarded was being put into place.

The Obama administration saw an explosion of “sanctuaries” for illegals: first towns and cities, and later whole states, declared themselves “sanctuary” jurisdictions where local and state police would be directed to not cooperate with federal C.I.S. and I.C.E. agents as they attempted to apprehend known criminals who were illegal entrants.  I.C.E., standardly, would file a detain and hold notice in a local jurisdiction or with a court magistrate whenever local police or sheriffs had arrested a fugitive illegal.  Local authorities, even judges, would facilitate the escape of the fugitive, even sentencing them to a number of days that meant they were free to go following their court appearance.   Then an employee or even a court officer would help the criminal out a back door so as to avoid federal I.C.E. agents attempting to serve an arrest warrant.  Criminal magic.

Is this “nullification?”  Not quite, but it certainly skirts the law.  Federal jurisdiction clearly extends to our borders and immigration, customs, contraband interdiction and arrest and deportation of illegal aliens.  In effect, our borders extend to any physical location of an illegal entrant.  “Sanctuary” status, self-declared by local authorities, attempts to establish local jurisdiction over illegal entrants where none exists, and in contravention of federal jurisdiction, that does exist, in law.  When President Trump attempted to withhold federal aid to police agencies that refused to cooperate with federal warrants, he was rebuffed by judges on the basis that there were no provisions for singling out departments or agencies for such withholding unless they had broken certain laws including misuse of funds.  Since police power is the jurisdiction of respective states, the President’s instincts couldn’t apply.  This is not to say that “Sanctuary” status is recognized in law or precedent; it is tolerated for lack of sanctions and lack of will to legislate them by Congress.

For the most crass and cynical reasons of political advantage, protecting illegal aliens became widespread: for Democrats, the eventual amnesty they pushed for might create millions of democrat voters; for Republicans, being accused of being anti-immigrant, or anti-Hispanic or, worse, racist, was too hurtful or too much trouble to refute.  Both parties’ supporters are happy to have cheap labor.  Neither party has made much sense in immigration over the past 40 years.

Trump, at least, attempted to gain control of our geographically and topographically open border with Mexico.  Democrats fought him at every step, particularly in terms of building a wall that would force potential entrants to specific points of entry where administrative procedures could be followed, including adjudication of refugee or asylee claims, most of which are legally denied.  Ultimately he had to divert dollars from military budgets to pay for about 500 miles of fencing.  One of the first steps President Biden took was to stop construction, putting all those expenditures and materials yet to be installed, to waste.  Elections have consequences.

Biden brought in Alejandro Mayorkas as Secretary of Homeland Security.  Mayorkas is an accomplished and committed liar.  To place him in the Cabinet is an affront to American citizens and to all those who have served in presidential administrations.  To place him over “DHS” is a lie in its own right.  There is no reason to trust that the Homeland is Secure.  There’s no such thing as compartmentalization of national security – it functions as a whole.  One cannot administer 1800 miles of wide-open border while claiming that, 1) the border is closed and secure; and, 2) we are secure at all of our ports, airports, imports and immigration procedures.  One can try, however, as Mayorkas has, including serial perjury before Congress.  Perhaps he’ll take the fall for the Biden administration when the rule of law returns to Capitol Hill.

Since Biden took office and started signing Executive Orders he may not have even read, more than 3 MILLION illegal entrants, claiming asylum, have been processed by the Border Patrol / DHS.  They include large numbers of Central and South American migrants, family units and children and hundreds of unaccompanied “minors.”  As they are “processed” they receive free cell-phones, clothing, back-packs and other niceties like “EBT” cards or meal chits, and bus or plane rides to their preferred location.  What a country!

Over the same period, however, illegal entrants from over 100 other countries – people whose claims to asylum require suspension of disbelief, as they have traveled many thousands of miles to get into Central America for the walk to el Norte.  There doesn’t seem to be any maximum number the administration is hoping to reach for migrants streaming across our “closed” and “secure” border.

Worse, some 900,000 “got-aways” have entered, too.  Now we’re talking.  No country has survived for long, nor any culture, nor any “people,” has or will survive for long if left undefended.  The Biden presidency is best defined as being anti-American, best-exemplified by failure to defend the nation. Unbridled and un-vetted immigration, free from the constraints of economic merit and/or freedom from disease, is a classic form of national dissolution… as though anyone would aspire to such a level of stupidity or incompetence.  One must stretch his or her incredulity to accept that Joe Biden actually received more votes for president than any other candidate ever has.  None of us should overlook the leftward collapse of Biden and, essentially, everyone he works with… or for. 

Mr. Biden has not only failed to comprehend the consequences of bad policies and incompetent appointees, he appears to actively pursue them.  What on Earth for?  More money?  More recognition or fame?  Help his depraved son, Hunter?  Maybe he doesn’t recognize depravity when he sees it in his own family.  Or, if his daughter’s diary can be believed, may… and it seems possible… maybe he doesn’t KNOW what is depraved and what is not – doesn’t know that Hunter’s incest with his older brother’s widow was depraved – or that hiring hookers to have sexual orgies laced with crack cocaine is depraved – or, as most ethical people would agree, doing the exact opposite of what he had sworn to do before God and country during inauguration, is also depraved.

Indeed, doing the exact opposite of what he has stood for during his political career is also a little depraved, when you think about it.

Biden, Foreign Policy, Governance, Politics 2022

NANCIEST

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WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 21: U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
(Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

How unfortunate it is… No!

How SAD it is… to be writing a post that Prudence hopes will be – can be – read later than September first of 2022.  Does that sound extreme?  The worries of a foolish patriot?  Maybe YOU are not paying attention.

Nancy Pelosi, relatively un-American Speaker of the House for only the crassest, most selfish reasons (those who have repeatedly voted her into the Speakership have always done so for their own, temporal, financial, re-election benefits and not those of their constituents) has decided to “visit” our Asian “friends,” indeed, leaving on the trip today, July 30, 2022.  Prudence hopes that this date does not mark the beginning of the end of the United States’ independence.

Part of her itinerary, perhaps for some good reason that escapes the grasp of most thoughtful observers, was announced to include a visit to Taiwan, an island nation with a most unusual history, coveted by Communist China since Chiang Kai-Shek fled the mainland at the end of the Communist Revolution.  The communists, in keeping with their world views, intend to fully absorb Taiwan, even as they have absorbed artificial islands they’ve created above various reefs in the South China Sea.

For several decades known as the island of Formosa, from a name bestowed by Portuguese explorers, Taiwan has never been a comfortable fit with the rest of Chinese Dynasties, experiencing numerous rebellions, particularly by indigenous Taiwanese, mostly populating the mountainous central spine of the island.  “Formosa” even existed for a few months as an independent Republic, following the Sino-Japanese War, in 1895.  Japanese rule also didn’t last very long.  Until the Nationalist Chinese under Chiang Kai-shek invaded and dominated the island in 1949, there had never been solid Chinese control of Taiwan (“Taoian” to its natives).  During the mid-1600’s the Dutch East India Company fought Han Chinese repeatedly for control of shipping and trade on the Pescadores islands near Taiwan, and control of Taiwan, itself.  They, too, were driven out.

All in all, control of Taiwan has only in the past 70 years been Chinese, albeit Nationalists.  The Communist mainland government has at least as legitimate a claim as the Nationalists, having defeated the Nationalists in 1949.  Only the support, explicit and implicit, of the United States, strong allies of the Nationalists against the Japanese in WW-II, has prevented Communist China (“PRC”) from taking over.  U. S. affinity for democratic republican governments, and for the strategic value of Taiwan specifically against the PRC, and our virtual economic and military dependence on imports from BOTH the PRC and Taiwan, forces the U. S. to attempt continued threading of the needle between the two nations.

China has made its intention to take over Taiwan clear; the U. S. has replied in muddled, ill-defined terms of “support” or “defense” of Taiwan.  Under Joe Biden, who always seems to back down when pressed by the PRC, China may perceive that there will never be a better opportunity to make a strike on Taiwan.  This should make everyone who voted for Biden for President and those who intentionally covered up his corrupt connections to the Chinese Communist Party, ashamed of their role in weakening the U. S. against the only country/empire that can not only replace the U. S. as the dominant force in the world, but, should we back down on Taiwan, push us out of the Far East as a trusted ally for anyone.

What are the possibilities if Nancy DOES stop off – or attempt to – in Taiwan?  None looks good, but we need to look around the world for other conditions in the summer of 2022 to understand the list of possible consequences.

China is watching the Russian crimes against Ukraine very carefully.  What has ”the West” done to counter the Russians?  Did NATO – the U. S. in particular – STOP the Russians?  Well, no, we shrank back when Russia rattled its nuclear weapons.  We have provided lots of weapons, not always timely, but eventually, and we appear to be content to let Ukranians die in their own defense.  The U. S. does not appear to be ready to die alongside them.  There is no particular reason why the U. S. would have the will to do anything different for the Taiwanese… at least, that is likely the logical deduction of the Chinese.

Then their question has to be: “If we attack Taiwan, will the U. S. do anything differently from what they’ve done for Ukraine?”  One wonders if anyone in OUR country knows the answer to that question.

But, the Chinese are both cautious and operating on a longer schedule than biennial elections in the United States.  Somehow the visit to Taiwan by the American Speaker of the House has presented a golden opportunity to China.  If a few blusters by the CCP can keep her from visiting, there is something to learn about U. S. resolve.  If she does visit, that is also something to learn.

But, but, but… what if she takes the challenge and decides to attempt to land on Taiwan in the face of the PRC’s telling her – and us – that she can’t go there without PRC permission?  Will the Communists perform their show of force as threatened?  Just as Pelosi may feel that she has to go to Taiwan, the Chinese may feel that they have to carry out their threats.  Now, Chinese fighters and U. S. fighters are in the same airspace with Chinese pilots acting aggressively.  One of them, or more, slides within the defined safe zone of the Speaker’s plane and Americans fire a warning shot to back them off.  The Chinese, who already threatened to fire warning shots in the run-up to the conflict, fire their own warning shots but an American plane, if not the Speaker’s plane, is hit.  The Americans shoot AT the offending Chinese plane and it is forced down or the pilot is forced to eject.

Talk about supply chain interruptions.  The Chinese could invade Taiwan as soon as the Speaker lands, or sooner!  Too bad if Americans are hurt or die.  The U. S. sinks an aircraft carrier.  It’s going to be a very difficult Christmas.

Do we even know what we are doing – the U. S. Navy that is firing people for not accepting those dangerous and useless mRNA injections?

Or, the Speaker decides to not visit Taiwan.  Everyone is all smiles as she returns to the U. S., but the end of U. S. enforced “freedom of the seas” is upon us, and history will have changed for a century or more, all to America’s disfavor.  This is a real pickle.  The Chinese could decide at that point that the U. S. is comprised of wimps and LGBTQx+ people who are too confused to fight for our country, and certainly too afraid to fight for any other: Taiwan is invaded.  Forty countries will abruptly stop playing nice with the U. S. and begin ignoring dollars.  Life becomes extremely unpleasant inside our borders.  Even welfare may have to be cut back!  God forbid.

Crime, Culture, Education, Elections, Governance, Guns, Right?, Politics 2022, Race, Religion, Representation, Responsibility

THE CONSTITUTIONAL MILITIA

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When tyranny threatens, elections are months away.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL MILITIA

The evolution of American constitutionalism responded no more to the several theories of rights and representation of the late 18th Century, as much as to the necessity of freeing ourselves from the shackles imposed by the British Crown and a non-representative Parliament.  That freedom would not have been won without “Militias” – home-grown assemblages of armed citizens, by definition, non-governmental organizations.  Our Constitution references these quasi-military, self-selected groups of passionate defenders of farm, family and business, in the Second Amendment.

The potency of the Second Amendment is rarely mentioned.  Everyone argues over the “… right to keep and bear Arms…”  Opponents of gun ownership point to the first phrase, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, …” as if it referenced what we now call the State Police, or even “State Militia” which are controlled and limited by our friendly and benign state governments.  Some liken the term to the National Guard, which is even further off the mark.  “Militia,” in the Second Amendment, refers to self-declared and assembled, armed, private-citizen organizations.  It is not clear that such organizations are legally tolerated today.

In fact, there are a number of such groups around the country: legal gun bearers who come together like clubs, perhaps including some militaristic training.  They tend strongly toward white-guys, exclusively, sometimes religious, generally anti-federal government.  Unfortunately, there is a parallel tendency toward racism, but the number of incidents in which members of such “clubs” attack blacks or others is very, very small… no way comparable to the numbers of blacks who attack everyone else, although never being charged with “racism.”

Militias have a bad name.  Still, they are a part of the patriotic front that challenged and stopped the British in the 1770’s, and which became part of the “official” Continental Army under general George Washington.  They were tough people, supported by equally tough wives and relatives, both farmers and merchants.  How would they fit in to today’s social fabric and political landscape?  They are referenced and promoted in our Constitution, but universally denigrated as, mainly, racist crackpots playing with guns.

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State…”  What “state” were the framers talking about?

At the time of the fight for independence, the “states” were colonies: 13 separate entities with separate civil authorities appointed by the King or by his governors.  To become sovereign states they had to both rid themselves of British governors and soldiers, who were the “police,” as it were, and then establish their own authorities with elections, appointments, codified laws and relatively independent courts.  They had, also, to defend themselves.  Automatically it became obvious that the colonies had to stand against the British together, else they’d be militarily quashed separately.  Without much debate, they formed the Continental Congress and a sense of “nation” was established across fairly diverse colonies.  A common enemy will do that.

Militias, essentially, were folded in to the individual colonies’ “Minutemen” forces and ultimately into the Continental Army, but not all of them.  Many Militia fighters served key roles in interfering with British supplies and cavalry, harassing them like guerilla fighters, sometimes providing a flanking force when standing ranks faced off on battlefields.  However, by the time of the war of 1812, militias were relatively unheard of.  Citizens were still armed, but the U. S. Army and Navy then formed the military wherewithal of the new nation, calling up fighters from the states, each of whom represented their states as much as they did the United States.

The Constitution acknowledged and stipulated the importance of “militias,” and stipulated the right to keep and bear arms, but militias, themselves, faded from prominence.

By the end of the Civil War there was no question that the military forces were U. S. forces, and the federal government took on the costs and administration of veterans’ disabilities and welfare.  States had police forces, but no longer raised their own “regulars” or trained or equipped them.  Militias, if such can be identified at all, devolved into chapters of the Ku Klux Klan, constantly ginning up anger against negroes – a most despicable era of American history.  Roughly speaking, the “Union” army and victorious states were “Republicans;” the former confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan itself, were “Democrats.”  Democrats supported gun control laws, among other segregationist restrictions, to keep guns out of the hands of blacks.  To maintain power and influence, the Klan, like revolutionary militias, had to constantly exaggerate the presence of a common enemy: free negroes.

“Militias,” now, are perceived as kooks.  Any concept of forming armed forces to overthrow “the government,” is inherently illegal, and only a tiny fraction of Americans in either party think it’s either practical or legitimate.  Yet the concept of non-governmental militias is Constitutional!  Where could “militias” fit in?  First, they’d have to meet standards.  Their fellow citizens would have to trust them in terms of public safety and support of the Constitution, itself.  Then what?

Somehow, some way, militias would have to coexist with police forces, both municipal and state.  Participation in “Guardian” training and functions is a good place to start.

The Guardian Program, yet to be adopted anywhere, is designed to “legitimize” concealed carry, in a sense.  The Constitution already protects the right to keep and bear arms – carry them around, in other words: to be individually armed.  As a Guardian, the person who is willing to carry a firearm would also be trained in handling, safety and safe reaction in the presence of a crime or imminent criminal act.  That person would also wear a “9-1-1” transponder that would identify and locate the individual and alert police forces to a possible active-shooter situation.  Meanwhile, the guardian would take such action as practical to defuse a conflict or stop criminal action until police arrived.

Finally, the guardian would be shielded by special indemnification for legitimate and proper actions taken to stop criminal actions, whether on his or her own property or in public.  “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”  The truth of that observation is timeless.  Establishing “Guardian” legislation enables the multiplication of police power and effectiveness at very low cost.  It also provides vectors for evaluating gun owners and their family environments.  If such gun owners formed the core of “militias,” governments and citizens could have confidence in their judgment and rationality.

Militias could also be held to ethical standards.  Non-guardians who “joined up” would have to swear to certain behaviors and practices concerning gun ownership, handling and safety inside and outside of their homes.  Militia organizations would be subject to fines for failing to adhere to ethical standards or for failing to reject or eject members who fail to do so.  Such information would have to be shared with law-enforcement and become part of the unacceptable persons’ records.  Most Militias would form through “Rod and Gun” clubs or hunting clubs  or “Sportsmens’ Clubs.”  Whether they could remain associated with those clubs would be a decision of the club, not of any government.  How would a Militia function politically?  How would the majority opinions of a Militia or dozens of Militias, enter into public policy or political power?  Who would their “common enemy” be?

By definition, the “common enemy” would be our own federal, central government at the moment it is perceived as tyrannical.  We have major political forces who are enthralled with government by experts – the bureaucratic state.  Decision-making by and for individuals is anathema to these leftist “Progressives.”  They are also anti-religious, increasingly opposed to free speech, virulently opposed to the second Amendment as written, and socialist in economics and social organization.  Many members of a militia organized to monitor and resist – if not remove – tyranny in our central government, would count “Progressives” among the tyrants.  A militia formed by progressives, for such there could be, though unlikely, would see themselves as saviors and conservatives as the common enemy.

Obviously, those most attracted to “militias” would be vilified and hated to greater degrees as members than they are, if at all, as relatively quiet, unobtrusive neighbors and co-workers.

Militias would tend to be somewhat secretive in their meetings and deliberations.  Using common social media communications would leave them open to attack and interference.  They will want to network – and perhaps coordinate – with other militias through a modern version of “Committees of Correspondence” as was done in Revolutionary times, when their discovery would have resulted in arrest and torture.  If not actual secrecy, strict confidentiality would be essential to operation and growth of militias.  But, how, short of taking up arms in fact, would constitutional militias influence political, governmental actions and direction?

Clearly they would have to be financially independent of government support or tax abatement or tax-free status on any places of meeting or practice / training.  They would be subject to continuous hate from leftists and racists, for they would not be able to control militias from the inside.  They would have to be scrupulous about opening membership to anyone who met their standards of behavior and ethics, which standards would include legal gun ownership, by definition.  But, again, how would a militia influence political power?  Could a militia sway the votes of others?

Communications, communications, communications.  As with the Committees of Correspondence, militias would have to present factual and documented positions on the actions of government(s) and of elected or appointed officials.  They would have to lay bare the nature of tyrannies large and small that made clear the un-representative nature of those in power including, most specifically, the expenditures of public monies.  To do so would mean operating publishing businesses in both print and digital formats.  Since a militia would not be a political “party” or be attempting to run candidates of its own, its publications would have to be both historical and current, and easily comprehensible as to how an issue/ topic either resisted tyranny of the state (or municipality) or fit into a tyrannical or potentially tyrannical action that threatened Constitutionally guaranteed rights or the freedoms of individuals.

Would anyone care if they did this work?  Would citizens listen?  Militias, like those that deposed tyranny at the inception of our country, have an obligation to pursue wisdom and to act upon it.  The first militias had the wisdom of recognizing tyranny and of how to multiply their effectiveness in fighting it.  It led them to wonderous courage and sacrifice.  To fulfill that legacy, Constitutional militias must form with that same sort of commitment.  Membership would not be a sport or part-time interest.  Just as “the Left” maintains decades, if not centuries, of commitment to upending Biblical truths and models of behavior and governance based on individual freedom and responsibility, Militias must maintain a singular purpose to inform other Americans of the lies and evil of Socialism and Communism, backed up by the ability to risk everything to overthrow tyranny in defense of the American Way.

The creation of one militia, independent and uncorrupted, will bring forth many others, and their creation still more.  We have learned after dozens of congresses and hundreds of representatives and senators, that the election of readily corruptible men and women who enter office with pathways of personal wealth and influence providing them all too many comforts and excuses for failure, has not – and will not – bring about the change needed to save and preserve our nation, our Constitution and our integrity.  A well regulated Militia is necessary to the security of a free State.

Crime, Culture, Education, Family, Religion, Representation, Responsibility, Sex

FROM ISSUES TO CRISES

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Despite Prudence’ writings over the past 8 years, the nation has not adjusted to the models of governance and behavior she has carefully laid out.  Upon the election of the odd Joe Biden and his basically anti-American administration, irritating, family and society-weakening tendencies have become policies, however illegitimately.  Now, they’re crises – crises that threaten the survival of our nation and of Freedom, itself.  Like the heart of Socialism in every sense, it derives from the avoidance of responsibility.

People say things like, “it’s a new day,” or “Times have changed.”  Except “times” haven’t changed, people have.  They’ve – we’ve – been taught new ideas to believe, habits to adopt, pleasures to revel in.  We can look to a sudden change upon the murder of President John Kennedy.  Most likely, the purpose of that assassination was political, not cultural.  Kennedy had created powerful personal and political enemies.  The abrupt change in culture and morals was an inadvertent one.  Lyndon Johnson became president, federal civil rights legislation moved to center stage, for right reasons, but its adoption was made possible by the crassest political calculations.  Inadvertently, for some but not all, the Civil Rights bill shifted morality into the metastasizing businesses of the federal administrative state and the court, where it has become enforced amorality. 

Prior to the ‘60s, change in living standards and integration was happening due to improvements in individual beliefs in better moral codes… not fast enough, by a long shot, but improvement and progress were being made.  The Civil Rights Act and the movement that brought it to fruition, inadvertently changed the nature of federal moral enforcement, even as it made long-overdue corrections to discrimination and segregation.  Part of the federal “corrections” included elements of the “Great Society,” which federalized welfare and began the application of laws differently for different groups.  This process, in all of its corrupt and socialist pieces, has rendered the federal government a soft tyrant which is hardening daily, while providing $Trillions of support for sub-tyrannies throughout the administrative state, particularly in Education.

Under the Constitution, the only moral adjustments can and should be made through equal justice: Equal protection under the law / equal application of the law.  That canary escaped with the passage of the Great Society.  Otherwise, our system works only if the vast majority of our citizens and residents share basic morals and mores, a claim that can no longer be made.  Every institution that could reinforce the moral strength of our people, including schools and churches, are either hell-bent in the opposite direction, or bending a knee to popular immorality.  For shame.

Freedom isn’t freedom without responsibility, it’s mere licentiousness.  As responsibility began evaporating in the 1960’s, leftists accelerated, as part of civil rights and the Great society, their domination of public education and colleges of education, themselves.  Like Mao’s “Long March,” it has taken decades – well-paid decades – to convert the role of education from conveyance of language, culture, skills, morals and history to our youth, to one of separation by race, class and, incredibly, gender.  Everything happening fulfills the Communist Manifesto: separation from God and from Responsibility.

Churches and liturgies have proven to be much weaker than the years of bygone sacrifices to hold to and establish those faith communities would indicate.  Just count the rainbow flags that some churches think override the teachings that brought them this far.  They are proving every day that it is nearly impossible to convince others of ideas you, yourself, don’t believe.  Simple economics can’t take the place of shared moral goodness.

America has been under moral attack for 60 years at a higher intensity than during its first 170 years.  As the lessons of Genesis make clear, God’s Word (or, if you find that term more offensive than child abuse) moral truths, are always under attack here on Earth.  Christianity has long been the primary target of such opposition, both from within and without.

For centuries those attacks tended to fail because the engine of responsibility kept working.  People still, for the most part, paid the price for their own follies and failures.  That is, until socialism replaced monarchy.  Evil men – almost always men – grasped socialist ideas as a better way to control nations, economies and armies, but they ultimately fell: their bases were evil and so counter to human nature that they became insane.  There has never been a government that created for itself political defenses that not only protected amorality and immorality, but learned to erode morality and, specifically, responsibility by individuals.  Not until the U. S. federal (and state) administrative states.  They’ve made a lot of “progress,” but they are “Progressives” by their own description.  It has taken 60 years of “re-education” to bring us to an America facing the corrosive issues we do today.

What are the parameters of responsibility in matters of conception, pregnancy, abortion and birth?

Since the ‘60s we have replaced marriage as the cultural norm, with contraception, abortion, “hooking up,” and fatherless children.  Responsibility has shifted to federal and state welfare programs.  Women have become convinced that they need not choose a decent, committed and loving man who will provide for his family and children, and who will be in their lives through puberty and into adulthood – and this all before having sex!  All they need is the sperm… and other men when they feel like it.  It is the destruction of the American family and of children – especially boys: our vote-buying tax dollars of destruction, at work.

Along with hyper-sexualization of grade school children, lewd “Pride” parades and filth in school libraries, the left appears to be obsessed with fornication for “all genders.”  To Democrats and other anti-Christian groups, fornication is a “right” as important to freedom as the First Amendment and all the rest.  Except, without responsibility, it’s not a freedom at all.  Enter abortion “rights.”  Except abortion never was a “right,” per se; democratic decisioning at the state level is the “right” our Constitution guarantees.

What are the parameters of responsibility in matters of guns, ownership, self-defense and crime?

Gun owners quote the phrase, “… the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”  It is part of the Second Amendment.  Some like to ignore the stuff about the “A well regulated Militia…”  But, as they may also choose to ignore, the amendment goes on to qualify the concept of a “militia,” as follows: “… being necessary to the security of a free State, …”  Above all, the Bill of Rights amendments and their wordings are intensely Prudent in their purposes of preventing a tyrannical central government.  Guaranteeing individual armament is crucial to that purpose.  Clearly, by simple inference, mindful of why the Constitution was drafted and mindful of the horrendous sacrifices needed to permit its creation, is it not obvious that arming the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT had nothing whatsoever to do with the second amendment?

The only “militias” in the new nation’s experience were those formed by local communities and others to fight off the central government, perceived to be tyrannical toward the colonies.  This aspect is never, ever acknowledged by that same federal government.  Yes, gun ownership is crucial to individual self-defense, which that same federal – and some states’ – governments appear to discourage, if not deny, to its citizens, even as those governments purposely abdicate their contracted role of public safety.  Had the British monarch established today’s same failed public policies, the justification for overturning his authority would have been far more popular.

There is a high expectation of responsibility for Constitutionally legal gun owners.  As a definable demographic, legal gun owners are the least source of crime and, by far, the least source of crimes involving firearms.  Yet this same group is always the target for restriction whenever a mentally or criminally defective person commits a “mass” shooting.  Individual shootings and murders by gang members and drug dealers are of no particular concern to those who attack the rights of legal gun owners.

Maybe the concept of “militia” for legal gun owners is one that should be developed – not by any government, but by gun owners, themselves.  “Whoa,” you might be saying.  “That sounds like a mechanism for insurrection.”

Well, it’s not, but that threat should ALWAYS be on the mind of the Executive departments, and on the minds of voters.  Sadly, and our own faults, the Congress should have it at top of mind, as well.  Americans have the RIGHT to replace a tyrannical government with a representative one.  One bright light – President Biden – during a press conference on gun control, uttered these non-sequiturs:

 
“Those who say the blood of lib- — ‘the blood of patriots,’ you know, and all the stuff about how we’re going to have to move against the government. Well, the tree of liberty is not watered with the blood of patriots. What’s happened is that there have never been — if you wanted or if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

If these words had been uttered by someone who knew what he were talking about, they’d be chilling to Americans…  perhaps, upon reflection, they are.  That bozo is President.  But the concept of “militia” is not far-fetched.  Certainly it is not a federal force, nor should it be funded federally.  “Militias” should be local, and the more local the better.  In the most Prudent view, those gun owners who choose to carry concealed could be part of an anonymous police-trained force that has been earlier referenced as “Guardians.”  (See: http://www.prudenceleadbetter.com/2016/05/30/the-guardian-program/) These same would be the nucleus of local militias.  Leadership of each jurisdiction’s militia would be chosen by election within the membership, and thereby granted officers’ titles.

The nature of “Militia,” Constitutionally, is inherently anti-federal.  No wonder this aspect of the Second Amendment is never discussed.  “Nuclear weapons,” indeed.  At the time of its adoption, the concept of “Militia” was understood as the forerunners of the Continental Army ultimately led by George Washington, named a General by the Continental Congress.  To make the revolution work required the establishment of a governing body separate from the King and his governors and troops.  It was all extra-legal and deemed illegal by the Crown.  Militias were already fighting the Redcoats by the time the Continental Congress got down to the business of revolutionary government.

Americans are so reliant upon a steady and dependable government in Washington, that we find it hard to conceive of an autonomous civilian militia, yet that is precisely what the framers were talking about.  The colonies had just fought off a tyrant and the framers were determined that we be just as prepared to fight off another, should the tyranny arise.  There existed very little affinity for a central government because of the tendency toward tyranny by virtually all such entities.  The ability of citizens to check the power of government provided all the justification needed for a Second Amendment.  Armed crime in the streets was practically non-existent in 1789, so that wasn’t the reason for it; hunting was so crucial to provisioning of food and even clothing, that no one had to “allow” for it in the Constitution.  What was crucial was preventing another tyranny from replacing the British Crown.  The twenty-seven words of the Second Amendment guaranteed the ability of citizens to replace a tyrannical central government, and Ratification was impossible without it.

Today, unfortunately, discussion of the true reason for the 2nd Amendment brings forth accusations of sedition and insurrection, “fringe” white-supremacist grouping, and religious fundamentalism.  Yet, it is the Constitution we have and that forms us, even now.

To the “left,” constitutionalism is suspect in all iterations.  It challenges and exposes the sanctity of the STATE for the hollow proto-tyranny towards which it constantly slithers.  The “establishment,” nearly as tyrannical as it could be – economically, morally, politically – is directly threatened by the Constitution, as are all tyrants, everywhere.  Our own proto-tyrants fight to make the U. S. as much like every other nation as they can, while patriots recognize and try to enhance the exceptional nature of our constitutional Republic.  “America first” sends chills down the spines of the permanently re-elected swine that wallow for decades at a time in the halls of Congress. 

Americans have unique responsibilities, including defense and preservation of the Constitution; it is not the task of elected people, specifically, but of THE PEOPLE.  The Constitution came not from government, but from “We, the People…”  WE ordained it, which is that we gave it life.  WE ratified it, but only when the Bill of Rights was appended to it, which is that we entered into a covenant  with all who forever after held office upon swearing to Preserve and Defend it – the Presidents merely a handful of those.  The ultimate defense and execution of the Constitution is our business: the People’s.  We are obligated to preserve it, defend it and live according to its rights and responsibilities on behalf of every American citizen, now and forever after, as well as on behalf of every nation and people, who depend upon the United States to stand firmly against globalism, socialism and communism… and dishonesty.  Let’s get busy.

Crime, Culture, Education, Family, Guns, Right?, Politics 2022

GUNS, BULLETS, PEOPLE AND POLICY

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PARKLAND, FL – FEBRUARY 18: Shari Unger, Melissa Goldsmith and Giulianna Cerbono
(L-R) hug each other as they visit a makeshift memorial setup in front of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Facts are part of the problems that must be solved to prevent “school shootings.”  Everyone who is distraught about yet another mass murder of our most innocent and, in every case, unprotected children, has facts about the incident, about other, similar incidents, perhaps about certain guns or numbers of bullets in a clip, and about what various public or political leaders have said about the same subjects.  Facts, however, are often mere data-points and not necessarily good anchors for solutions or even “truths.”  Those require judgment, balance, cool reasoning and imagination.

For example, we have learned that Salvador Ramos, the sick, troubled 18-year-old who had considered, if not planned, to shoot up a school for at least FOUR YEARS, had managed to buy two AR-15 model rifles and more than 1,500 rounds of ammunition.  Those are facts but they don’t lead us to any solution.  Some have said, in effect, “He should never have been able to buy those items!”  They are absolutely right, but why?  Because no one should be able to buy them?  It is a Constitutionally protected right; do we throw out our right to self-protection because a crazed teenager committed a terrible crime?  Some believe that removing the rights of law-abiding Americans IS a solution.  It’s not that clear.

Ramos was known to be disturbed and dangerous for at least 4 years.  He was arrested and held for mental evaluation at age 14.  Nothing was placed in his record.  Four years later he appeared to be a legal 18-year-old ADULT when he went to buy a gun, BUT HE SHOULD NOT HAVE appeared so!  One has to ask why we have background checks if no data is going to be added to that background?  Legal, licensed gun owners are fully in favor of realistic registration and licensing… not to punish gun dealers, but to keep guns out of the hands of people too unbalanced to handle the responsibility of gun ownership.  If regulations are not designed to assess responsibility and balance in individuals, then they will likely reduce freedom and rights for honest citizens, which is not the covenant the Constitution is based upon.

We could list all the mistakes made on the day of the event in Uvalde, but few will listen because they already “know” some un-Constitutional restrictions are the “real” answer.

Here’s another set of facts: somewhere between 600,000 and 2 Million times a year (fairly steady data over the past 20 or more years, including studies by beloved, official agencies), private gun-owners stop or prevent crimes, almost always without actually shooting a gun.  Even if it were only 1,000,000 times a year, that’s an average of 2,740 incidents a DAY that a criminal act is prevented or interrupted before police could arrive on scene.  It likely prevents several hundred other crimes that would be perpetrated had the “perp” succeeded in the interrupted one.  Civil society would be almost impossible without private, legal gun ownership.

In fact, legal gun owners – MOST ESPECIALLY NRA MEMBERS – are the least likely demographic to commit crimes in the United States!  Why is the NRA hated and vilified by so many?  Perhaps it’s because they do not compromise on the Constitution, whereas one political party, and politicians individually, are constantly trying to soften the restrictions placed on them by the Constitution… especially on the Left.  One can look not so far back in history to see that authoritarians, dictators, fascists and Communists consistently move to disarm their populations.   Why are America’s “leaders” always trying to do the same?  Perhaps they dream of leaving the home of freedom and its massive responsibility, and joining the club of dominance, repression and never having to answer to anyone or for anything.

A known screwball, virtually unchallenged by those well-paid and trained to challenge and STOP nuts like him, is allowed into a “gun-free” school where, again, he is not challenged for an HOUR or more, during which he completes the murder of 19 children and two teachers.  Before the little bodies have cooled off, leftists began clamoring to take guns away from honest citizen-gun-owners, especially if they are members of the NRA!  It makes only twisted, leftist sense while offering no solution to mass shootings.  Yet anyone who tries to point out all the failures of existing gun laws or of police agencies is vilified and accused of “having blood on (your) hands.”  What rot.

No gun, hand or long, has ever shot a bullet by itself, but people who are the most ignorant about guns have labeled the scary-looking ones as “assault” rifles.  Somehow, the scarier the appearance of the rifle the more likely it is to have its own intentions.  Augmenting the intentions of the shapes, springs, nuts and bolts of a rifle are the declarations of the frightened that “no one needs a rifle that can shoot 10, or 20 or 30 bullets without reloading.”  Alternatively, those scared or angered by the shape of rifles climb a little higher upon their dudgeon, claiming that, “no one should be hunting a deer by spraying it with bullets from an assault rifle.”  Finally, something that has a kernel of truth, although it’s not the argument that will expose a solution to the vulnerability of school children.

Prudence’ task is not to defend AR-15’s or any other legal weapon; the purpose at hand is to figure out how to keep bullets fired from ANY weapon from traveling toward a child, in school or anywhere else.  This is the point, is it not?

First, without destroying any part of the Constitution, let’s “harden” the schools, themselves.  Make it a rational process to get into school buildings, and have an armed guard at the point of entry as children arrive and leave.  Have facial recognition systems that identify any adults who may be connected to a student, there.  Have metal screens that can block doors and windows by remote control, and panic buttons that start recordings of every hallway, office and classroom, as well as immediate surroundings, as they summon police electronically.  Along with this there should be at least a handful of staff who are exceptionally trained to fire back at shooters with AR-15-type weapons that are locked in a gun safe or safes inside the school.  Schools would become very UN-inviting targets, rather than corrals for “sitting ducks” as they now are.

All of these steps only apply where people who think children are entitled to grow up, live.  They aren’t designed to help anyone’s re-election.

What about “common-sense gun laws?”  Apparently, there aren’t any since all of those proposed don’t add to anyone’s safety.  But there are rational, Constitutional regulations that increase both freedom and public safety, and they should be employed before anyone loses his or her unalienable rights.  Here are a few:

First, teach children about guns, safe handling, the law, and responsibility.  We seem Hell-bent on teaching kids how to have sex, with NO responsibility, while non-marital sex ruins more lives than guns each year – many time over.  Prudence would start gun clubs and teams around the 7th or 8th grades, with severe consequences for irresponsible handling of any firearm, even to the point of delaying the age at which a person can legally buy a gun or be licensed, should he or she not take school gun courses seriously.  Such training and practice would also reveal certain psychological problems or tendencies around guns that could bring useful counseling into the picture.  It would also prepare youth for later military acceptance should they choose that form of service or career.

Firearm skills can be the basis for healthy competition just as golf, tennis or basketball skills are.  Sharp-shooting is hard.  Learning the mechanisms, maintenance and proper handling of a weapon is no more likely to turn a teen toward murder than learning how to cook with sharp knives, hot oil or heavy frying pans.  But it will reveal tendencies to ignore safety and propriety and some other reasons for denying or delaying later gun ownership.  It is infinitely safer than school-age sexual experimentation.  Being taught to be afraid of guns is both illogical and immature.  Guns are tools, in a sense, like baseball bats.  They can’t shoot themselves any more than a bat will hit a pitched ball by itself.  They should be learned and understood: it’s part of growing up in America.  After learning about them one isn’t forced to own or deal with them later in life; he or she should know the rights and responsibilities that connect to guns… it’s part of the Constitution, after all.

We all should fear the warped intentions of the few who are willing to commit gun-shot murder, itself, or to enforce surrender by the victims of other crimes.  Many of these intentions can be discerned well in advance of the commission of criminal acts, including school shootings.  Whether in Newtown, Connecticut (Sandy Hook School), Parkland, Florida (Marjorie Stoneman Douglass High School), Uvalde, Texas (Robb Elementary School), or even in Littleton, Colorado (Columbine High School) and elsewhere, the troubled mental and emotional states of the perpetrators was well-known to many, sometimes for months or years.  Parents knew, school officials knew, fellow students knew.  In some cases, police, mental health services or agencies, even the F.B.I.(!) knew of threats to “shoot up” a school and did nothing or blame some bureaucratic error for doing nothing in time to stop the impending murders.  To solve this problem, the Biden administration and other dim bulbs want to take away legal weapons owned by law-abiding, stable citizens.  That’ll work.

Another approach consists of “Red Flag” laws, where guns might be removed from people who appear to be unstable in some way, or criminally inclined.  A strip-mine dump-truck could fit through that legal loophole as currently proposed.  But maybe a form of pre-emption would be Prudent; maybe clear heads could craft laws that preserve due process and the Constitution while minimizing the likelihood of future crimes.  Instead of punishing people for their political views by accusing broad groups of Americans of some “ism” or other, observations of aberrant tendencies could be acted upon in special, secret hearings that won’t destroy suspects’ reputations.  Would this mean executing an arrest warrant?  Not necessarily.

What if a plain-clothes officer arrived at a residence to interview the person named – what sort of document would he or she have that might convince the resident to allow entry?  Could it be created and presented without creating a permanent “black mark” on a suspect’s “record?”  Could the “accuser,” or, at least, suspicious observer, remain anonymous throughout the process to avoid retribution?  What about when the suspicious observer is a member of the suspect’s household?  Will the revelation of the suspicions aggravate family tensions?  These are all factors that must be dealt with before police legally try to take guns away from a licensed owner.

Perhaps gun training in school would help create a profile that would enhance the licensing process for certain individuals, keeping guns away from potentially unstable young adults.  We know the profile of instability; couldn’t we be just a little more careful in the presence of that profile?  Even Prudence would agree to some limits.  Why is the “solution” proffered by leftists ALWAYS confiscation and banning?

One of the “commonsense,” but dopey ideas that is often mentioned on the left, is some form of personalized connection to one’s firearm.  That is, a fingerprint or palm-print has to match before the gun is operable.  This is so impractical, especially at times of emergency, that it literally negates gun ownership for any of those one-to-two-Million prevented or interrupted crimes each year.

However, as is popular for certain cars, the gun could be rendered usable only in proximity to a key-fob type, RFID device.  Even if stolen, the gun would not be usable without gunsmithing work.  The proximity could be so localized that children handling the gun would be prevented from accidental wounding.

It seems obvious that “protecting children” is not the purpose of Democrat-proposed “commonsense gun laws.”  Protecting children could start in any urban ghetto by enforcing mandatory sentencing for illegal gun use or possession.  Hundreds of children, mostly teenagers, kill one another with illegally possessed AND used guns, primarily handguns.  If arrested, so-called “gun charges” are routinely plead down specifically to avoid incarceration, which is so unfair if a perpetrator’s skin is brown.  Disproportionate impact.

By the same token, they could protect kids who are struggling to be born… if they cared about children.  There’s certainly disproportionate impact on unborn babies with brown skin.  But those killings aren’t murders – killings with guns are.  Yet, they continue, despite all gun laws to the contrary.

Are we interested in preventing school shootings?  Protecting our children from sexual abuse in grade school?  Protecting our children long enough to be born?  How are the children, anyway?

Crime, Culture, Economics, Family, Health Care, Politics 2022, Religion, Sex, Terrorism

Belief, Reality and Death

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Says it all…

Life can be much more uncomfortable for any group or faction, than its members, literally, never planned for, should the motivating ideologies that have activated the group politically, emotionally or intellectually be exposed as, essentially, incorrect.  It is very upsetting, and more so if you are in the subset of that faction that is the last to realize that your beliefs really can’t apply to reality any longer.  Those so impacted are quite likely to strike out against those who knew of the wrongness of the formers’ beliefs well in advance of the “new” awareness of those upset.  In effect, a larger and larger majority of society appear to be becoming enemies of the newly “awakened” – a most unsettling environment.

This shift in “truths” can affect the powerful as well as the marginal.  For those with political power, the reaction seems never to be an adjustment in action or belief, no admissions of error.  Rather, the reaction is likely to be what is called “doubling down” on the old beliefs and supporting actions.  To a degree, we can see this reaction in Congress, most particularly within and around the so-called “January Sixth Committee,” which has as its main purpose the proving of “White Supremacy” and “domestic terrorism” as the prime motivators of anyone who ever supported Donald Trump.  As expected, evidence of the opposite being true is routinely ignored or denigrated as simply part of the “big lie” that the ever-smaller sub-group is sacrificing so mightily to expose.  This concentrated cabal remains certain that all Americans will embrace their sacrifice once that premise is “proven.”

For many, the foolishness embodied in the January Sixth committee barely registers as a problem worthy of Congress’ attention, which helps to show the falseness of the premise noted above.  The shrinking inner group of alternate believers seems to be more determined than ever to prove their case.  Should that fail, hatred of the alternate believers will be the irreducible collapse of their dimming star: there will be no supernova.

So it is with abortion and “choice,” but on a much longer timeline and background of seeming success.  This awakening will be one of the most wrenching that America has faced, certainly since the 2nd Civil War.  That one, over slavery, finally, made America stronger.  The collapse of Abortion, Incorporated, has the potential of doing the same, but only if churches wake up at the same time.  America “works” only in a society of shared morality.  Will a new understanding of life, itself, open people’s hearts?  Not very quickly, Prudence fears.

Abortion “rights” distill the human conflict between spirituality and the worship of socialist government.  This conflict has existed since the “Garden of Eden” when the “serpent” convinced “Eve” that surely she would not (actually) die if she ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but that she would become like the gods in knowing of good and evil.  When God learned that Adam and Eve had eaten of the tree His love for them tempered his punishment: not death, but difficulty, and banishment from “the Garden.”  The “thesis” was that Eve and Adam would die if a certain commandment were not observed; the “serpent” provided the “anti-thesis” that surely they would not die.  God’s love for His “children” softened the punishment, as love does and should do, which was explained as the antithesis being slightly more true than the thesis.  This is the same dialectic employed by Marx and Hegel and Engels. 

For thousands of years, amidst phenomenal progress, prosperity and elevated standards of living, the lure of authoritarianism, Nazism, Soviet Communism and Fascism has clung to the human condition like a voracious parasite.  Its only opponent is God and, as Christians believe, his son, the Christ.  The story of Jesus Christ, whether one is a believer or not, is a dramatic departure from identity only as part of a religious group.  Grouping is virtually automatic, but being FREE because of a personal connection to God, rewards faithful individuals with personal responsibility for individual decisions, choices and actions.  There is no freedom without that responsibility; there is no freedom when “right” action is taken only in fear of some earthly authority. 

Back to the future of our once-great nation.

Is there a source within society that can rebuild a common morality?  Our collective conscience?  We need two key elements… no, THREE: 1) Non-political churches; 2) Morally guided education; and, 3) Equal application of laws.  Free individuals have the power to empower all three factors.  Yet, our imperfect politics is what we tend to look to for salvation from problems created by, mostly, politicians.  Do we have some reason to believe that, facing a wide replacement of those in Congressional power, that the new crop of “representatives” in either House is going to help us chart a more morally straight national course?  There is almost no historical support for that outcome.

But there is opportunity for America, and it’s wrapped up in our ability to deal with the promised agitation from pro-abortionists.  There is no greater moral imperative than to protect our children.  There is no economic value that comes close to that of protecting our children.  Supposedly economically or politically powerful people can issue drivel that tries to connect the destruction of the unborn with some sort of economic benefit.  Obviously the economy exists because there are people, but it is a stretch beyond all reason that aborting new lives is good for everyone, let alone any one.  Still, there is a good possibility that overreaction to the end of Roe v. Wade will awaken many who are rabidly in favor of abortion, now.  It certainly will focus attention on the worst forms of butchery and profiteering.  Prudence would indicate that there is still sufficient moral outrage in Americans’ hearts to overcome the allure of political/financial power.  To those in Democrat power, abortion has been played for added power for 50 years – the destruction of 62 Million lives has been a small price to pay to keep re-electing Democrats.  What a foul bargain.

The illegal “leak” of Justice Alito’s draft opinion on “Roe,” has unleashed a rash of law-breaking by proponents of unfettered abortion.  Within that is the possibility of exposing the utter lawlessness of our own Department of Justice under AG, Merrick Garland.  Not only has he lied to Congress in sworn testimony, but he has employed the FBI to investigate parents who are upset about improper educational curricula and ideological indoctrination of their children.  The FBI was instructed by Garland to open cases under “domestic terrorism” titles regarding parents who broke no laws.

Now, as proto-criminals harass Supreme Court Justices in direct violation of federal law, America’s AG ignores them and refuses to direct the FBI to apprehend and charge those breaking 18 U. S. Code Section 1512.  Unfortunately, with Garland’s apparent political agreement with demonstrators who are in contravention of that section of federal law, and with his established willingness to break federal laws, himself, and to lie about it, no apprehensions or prosecutions appear likely.  Perhaps stopping illegal demonstrations is a threat to Democratcy. (spelling intended)

As Prudence has noted before, contracts, including covenants with a free people, are only as good as the integrity of the parties to them.  Changing the meaning of words is a common and corrupt means of sidestepping truths, a major cornerstone of integrity.  The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence says, in English, that our unalienable rights include Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  The abortion travesty of 1973’s Roe versus Wade decision tried to codify the redefinition of “Life.”  There no longer was a question of life or death of a fetus, provided that the pro-death faction was allowed to define when life began to exist.  The court did not rule on that, although it tried to “split the baby,” so to speak, by stating that States could limit abortion to the first one or two trimesters of, well, LIFE, perhaps, for lack of a better name.  But, in the Blackmun opinion, abortion was allowed throughout pregnancy.

The floodgates were thus opened to dozens of interpretations of “when life begins,” largely coming down to “when the pregnant woman decides it does,” largely on the basis of convenience, not on the life or health of the mother or of the baby.  Needless to say, this open-ended death warrant included, and has been argued to include, “abortion” up to the moment of birth.  In effect, a woman who decides at the very day of birth that she does not “want” the baby, for it certainly is such, can deny its right to live beyond a point of starvation or dehydration after birth.  It seems Prudent that a live baby is a citizen of the United States and causing it to die is murder, no matter the reason or logic for the act.  The pro-death faction has been allowed, in some jurisdictions, to redefine the meaning of “murder,” too.

Perhaps there will arrive a national awakening to the horrors of abortion, the cruelty, the pain, the denigration of humanity and even the anti-God aspects thereof.  Perhaps morality will win out.  Perhaps this 5th Civil War will begin the process of restoring America and erasing our ability to believe one of the worst aspects of socialism: that a fetus can be both a person and not a person at the same time.

Socialism depends on large numbers of people acting as though two diametrically opposed ideas are true.  Such mental incongruities are all around us, today.  That so many young people can believe, in the midst of unparalleled freedoms, that socialist central governance will make them more free, is one such incongruity.  Believing that men and women can change their genders with enough determined willpower, is another.  People will fight to hold these opposing ideas simultaneously.  In order to do so, of course, requires constant reinforcement by immersion among groups who are also determined to believe two incongruous ideas.  They have to redefine a lot of words to support their beliefs.

They ought to be made to answer some obvious questions as, for example, when the somewhat confused mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, was asked if there should be any limits on abortion, and his answer was “No, no limits.  It is a woman’s right.”  Any reporter with enough courage to ask a public figure a question without prior clearance, should have then asked, “Are there any limits on what procedures may be used to stop the heart of a baby who survives the abortion process?”

As an alternative, should no one with that much courage be within earshot, would be, “Mr. Mayor… if the baby survives the abortion, is it a citizen of the United States?”  Surely there would be an answer to one of those queries.  At least one of the “abortion activists” shouting slogans in recent days opined that a mother could decide up to the age of two years, or even later, whether the living, growing fetus actually had a right to live and grow any longer.  When pressed, it all came down, FOR HER, to “… it’s the mother’s right.”  That outlook seems imprudent, at least, and blatantly murderous.  How did a female of the species arrive at such a belief?

Prudence indicates that truth will overcome evil, whether EVIL agrees with it or not.  The subgroup that likes rubbing shoulders with evil or Satanism, itself, will be come smaller as those farther out from the pit are able to be revulsed by what they’ve been instructed to ignore.  At the same time, those who never bought the pro-death lies will gain the courage to resist, if not fight, the proponents of eliminating children.  In fact, here are a couple of protester signs that might help: Babies are a pain in the vagina: Get rid of them!  Or, if that point is misunderstood, All unwanted children should be killed!  Convenience Ăźber alles, God forbid.